No-go Gaga

When film distributors have little faith in the quality of a movie, they opt not to screen it for critics before it opens. Movie reviews are almost always published on a film’s opening day, and a bad review could damage that all-important first weekend at the box office. Ergo, no media access usually equals Stinker.

But what does it mean when a pop star enjoying skyrocketing popularity and album sales bans media from her live shows, as Lady Gaga and her team attempted to do Wednesday night?

It’s bewildering. Ms. Gaga is not exactly a wallflower. She’s everywhere, from performing on awards shows to curtseying the Queen of England to sitting in the Barbara Walters hotseat. In fact, she’s so ubiquitous, she risks overexposure – and I’m not referring to her provocative fashion choices. So why did her management issue a statement at the eleventh hour that no media access for reviews, photography or video would be allowed at any of her three Vancouver shows this week?

So strict was the ban that my own personal tickets (which were not freebies, by the way, although they were sourced through a Live Nation contact) were revoked in case I used one to sneak my reviewer in the door (which is of course exactly what I would have done.) Well, I was bummed that I didn’t get to see the show, but thanks to the brisk secondary market in tickets, their efforts didn’t prevent us from getting a review, of course. You can read it here: http://bit.ly/53yNwa But it raises the question: Why would they want to?

Possible reason one: The show sucks and they don’t want the bad publicity.

Well, this clearly isn’t the case. Lady Gaga’s shows are sheer spectacle and have been wowing audiences at every stop on the tour. (All the theatrics of a Britney Spears roadshow but with REAL SINGING!) It’s hard to imagine that seeing a stadium-sized personality such as Gaga in a relatively intimate setting like the Queen Elizabeth Theatre would disappoint. Besides, the trio of shows is sold out, so they’ve got nothing to lose.

Possible reson two: They want to keep the details of the show under wraps so as to surprise the audience each night.

Ok, that’s just never going to work. Every single person in there was blogging, tweeting, taking pictures and posting it all to the web. See our amazing gallery of reader-submitted photos: http://bit.ly/6l0sLx. There are no secrets in a digital world, so why hide?

And that brings me to the final and, to my mind, the most likely reason the Lady was playing hard to get with local media: Because she can.

It makes our job as journalists more difficult. It forces fans who didn’t get to the show to search a little harder for reviews and photo coverage, which might come late or not at all. And it makes a Lady Gaga concert review a rarefied thing, a hot commodity worth scrambling for. As the most buzzed-about pop star of the moment, Lady Gaga is doing all she can to crank that buzz up to eleven. In other words, it’s pure diva behaviour.

She’s flipping the bird to media, saying to us, in effect, “You need me more than I need you.” And at this moment, it looks as though she’s right.

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